Jeongin had begun to confuse the edges of wakefulness and dream. The girl visited him at odd hours — a glance reflected in a spoon, a shadow crossing his doorway — and each visit felt unbearably real. At night he would lie awake and swear he could hear soft syllables threaded through the radiator’s hum. Then the fingerprints started: smudges on the glass, tiny prints on the bookshelf, an impression on the mirror that made his skin go cold. It wasn’t just fear; it was a peculiar ache, a yearning for someone who might not exist at all.

Needing fresh air more than thought, he left the apartment and walked without a destination. The city softened around him — leaves chattering, distant horns, sunlight pooling on wet pavement. Music seeped through his headphones and steadied him. He was counting steps, measuring out a small calm, when a figure moved past, so ordinary it almost vanished. But something in the way she turned — the angle of her jaw, the careless lift of her shoulder — arrested him. She was the image he’d been haunted by for weeks, embodied and walking the same street. He stopped dead; the world narrowed to the space between them and the prickling realization that whatever was happening to him was spilling into the daylight. Jeongin’s breath hitched. For a moment he thought he must still be dreaming, that the city itself had blurred into another hallucination. But no—people jostled past, a child tugged at their mother’s sleeve, a dog barked somewhere behind him. All of it was too vivid. Too present.